Trogly's "Fakepit" | The Replica 1997 Gibson Les Paul Slash Snakepit | History + Review

this is part two of this tale make sure you catch part one right here also is a correction i want to be abundantly clear mr harrison had nothing to do with this guitar there was some confusion in that first episode his name was only thrown into the mix with those photos to confuse and trick me even further welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogley's guitar show today we learn about a very historic guitar this thing right here is slash's very first signature guitar now this wasn't his guitar obviously but it's the very first slash signature model that was publicly available anyways we'll learn a little bit about the one that predates this one here in a second but let's go ahead and get this beauty open for many years i've teased you guys with this review and demo inside here sleeps the 1996 97ish slash snake pit it's got a relief carving it's got a snake on the fretboard it's a fancy boy and it is pretty darn cool so let's go ahead and learn a little bit about the history of this elusive beast okay so the snake bit last ball was first introduced in 1996 in an initial batch of 50 of them it took about two years for them to complete so you can't find them all the way until about 1998. however it's kind of hard to tell what year yours is because they just have an sl xxx serial number going up to about 100. there were two batches of them the first run of 50 they'll have a little certificate of authenticity that says hey we only made 50 of these but there was such a huge demand for this guitar that they made another batch of 50. now i heard rumors that they didn't quite make all the 50 but that could just be my memory failing me but there's at least 100 of these and slash got four of these as part of his endorsement deal three production level ones and the prototype how do you know you found the prototype the snake on the front is actually rotated another 90 degrees so like if you hung it up on a stand you would see the snake display properly rather than when you're playing it unfortunately they were stolen in 1998 during a break-in of his personal studio so the one that you actually see him use is apparently one that gibson built him to replace those ones so if you ever see the prototype snake bit its rightful owner is still slash you might not want to buy that one but the initial retail price as far as i can find online was 5000 usd even adjusted for inflation that's only 8 800 which is kind of cheap for an art guitar like this a real relief carving out of the top fancy inlays something like this today would probably cost about twenty five thousand dollars brand new with slash's name attached to it but just a general art guitar anywhere between like fifteen to twenty thousand brand new so it's no surprise that the used market used to dictate these were worth somewhere between thirty to fifty thousand dollars right now there's only one up for a hundred grand but nobody's buying it as of yet however six years prior in 1990 slash actually did four custom orders himself and that is technically the first signature guitar it kind of has a washed out red orangish finish to it with piercing yellow binding on it but he ordered them from gibson during a namm show but then after that there was a run in 2004 and then they skipped about four years and then basically from 2008 to the current day there's been so many gibson models i personally counted approximately 27 gibson models that have slash's name attached to them from a couple of firebirds a double neck which you can check out that review and demo here and just a whole slew of les pauls that's not including any type of epiphone guitars and yes if you happen to like the look of this thing they did make an epiphone version as well it sells for crazy money in its own right it just has a snake decal on it though it doesn't have the fancy fretboard or anything like that but it is available so what is the rest of the story of the snake pit why does slash actually have this snake on it to begin with slash's snake pit is actually the name of a super group that was founded in 1994. it consisted of guns and roses members matt sorum gilby clark and obviously slash himself you've got mike from alice in chains and eric dover from the band jellyfish and this snake slash polymerization with a bone was actually the album cover for their it's five o'clock somewhere album it was designed by slash's brother ash hudson and for gibson it was carved out by a man named bruce kunkel who worked for them at that point in time he was the custom art carver he did a whole bunch of stuff he did all the paint work and when i talked to him he absolutely hates the snake yet till today only because he had to do so many of these things but unfortunately if you've been following my channel this is not actually a real slash snake pit i was scammed out of 15 000 odd dollars to purchase what i thought was real many of years ago but if you want to learn all about that story you can check out this video right here today we need to find out what the heck is this thing bruce kunkel he thought it might be a made over gibson usa to kind of make it look like a snake pit as close as humanly possible to trick someone and it was just good enough for that and it's been a good five years since i've had this thing on the workbench but i vaguely remember agreeing with what i had saw there but you also have to remember my experience level has changed a lot in identifying gibson guitars since when i first got this thing like i was just a beginner at that point in time now i'm very well versed in looking at things when it comes to telling real luthier made replicas versus the real deal it can get tricky this is not some cheap chinese fake that you can order off of aliexpress for 350 bucks this is a quality instrument it just needs a little bit of tlc i mean first impressions of this just feeling the neck i can tell there's something up here because it has such a sloped shoulder to it it's kind of an interesting feeling right there then obviously everything that we talked about in the last video the weird finish that has like the metallic flake or dust or whatnot in it obviously some of the coloring being wrong some of the hardware that didn't quite exist yet when this guitar was produced and the serial number just not quite being the right font and like the finish the color is actually called cranberry this is just a little bit darker than that than what they would be you can check out some examples of real ones for that on top of all the fanciness of the guitar i do want to take a second to appreciate the case of these this is a very early custom art historic gibson case the way that you can tell the early ones is the logo is up here so like when you open it people can see it right there whereas on the later ones they kind of moved it more down here more towards the middle i just happen to have one that i can show you both obviously the font is a little bit different this is much more bold but it's really the exterior of the case that you should be paying attention to here these have a very printed snakeskin like vibe to them it's just a very interesting feeling as compared to the other ones it's just like a basic modern day gibson custom shop case just with a different logo they made a lot more of these than they did these so whenever you see one of these things show up for sale separately they're worth a lot of money because they're the original case to guitars like these as well as like the original florentine and bantam customs the handles are a little bit different as compared to the other ones but it's really the interior that's also changed a lot so here's the newer one it's basically once again just like the modern day custom shop cases that they still use yet today this is just like the very first iteration of it before they just switched it to gibson custom you can see it's got a flap like we're used to seeing here the red crest velvet interior but then we go over here and it's more of like a felt material rather than the crushed velvet but it has extra support down here with these big blocks that you don't have on this other model they just switch to this light cushioning system so you do have a little bit more room going on here they've got this large case block up here to keep the guitar secure whereas they did away with that on later runs same thing with right here you don't see that on a lot of cases that locks it into place on the single neck rest whereas this one they did away with that but gave it a second neck rest which is technically superior these guys were made by tkl in canada and the lid actually goes this way which is the opposite of what we do modern day whereas this one it opens like most cases like this it has the same kind of snakeskin print interior here and this is actually on a hinge so you don't have to worry about that breaking that's one of the very few gibson cases that actually utilizes that instead of just the fabric keeping it together that is a premium feature that they likely cut out to save costs on but only one neck rest technically on these guys so a very cool very different case from what came later so if you ever have a snake pit that doesn't come with this case uh you should be a little bit leery i would say the build quality actually feels better on these it's a slightly bigger case too and it feels like it was made out of heavier duty woods as compared to the newer ones but there's a quick comparison for you but to learn more about the slash snake pit fake let's go ahead throw it on the workbench and take an individual look at its parts and specs [Music] inside fake snake let's go ahead and see what is going on so our pickups as i had mentioned in the last episode they are the seymour duncan signature slash set the first time i got this guitar i figured well that makes sense slash signature pickups in his signature guitar except for at that point in time these things weren't out now reading up online apparently this is the same style of pickups that did come in the originals however they didn't have this signature yet so those have definitely been replaced but it's reasonings like that that there were no photos even yet today that i can find documenting the inside of a snake pit last paul or some of the fine details because had those have been available i would have never got scammed on this thing it'd been so easy to be like oh no that's not right because look at this real one here's that that and that you don't have to find owners of it and then beg them to tear theirs apart because some guys they think it's taboo to do that you don't hurt a guitar tearing it apart as long as you're careful and you know what you're doing so that's why i do what i do today i share all these videos of guitars with you guys so hey if somebody buys a especially a high-end guitar they can cross-check it with my videos or pay me to take a look at the guitar on their behalf so in many ways i owe a lot to this guitar for teaching me that's what i should do and evolving my show into what it is today but anyways the meat and potatoes let's find out what this thing is with the pickups out of the way is that a long neck tenon no it's not somebody's actually just taking a little router bit and made it look like it has one sneaky sneaky i believe the original snake bits would have a long neck tenon being a custom shot but again i've never seen inside one but one day i will get a real one to document so this never happens again but this this is interesting you see this like uneven route right here this is something you find in this era of gibson les paul standards so i really truly do believe this is a gibson usa body of some sort further proof is in the neck pickup but you have to get your light out to see it there's some markings in there and we've definitely seen those in real gibsons usually up here there's some sort of a color code but unfortunately they just happened to put that route right where the initial color code would be so i'm very confident that this started life as a gibson usa at least the body i mean there's a possibility that it could have been re-topped but looking at this top i'm guessing no there are standards that look just like this that were available then so for fun the middle position reads 4.97 k ohms our bridge pickup reads 8.02 and the neck position whoa 13.2 wow that seems a bit strange but then again i'm not really familiar with this pickup set and inside the pickup cavity we can indeed see it has a real maple top of the mahogany body now whether they put a veneer over top of the real maple top i guess i can't really say for certainty but i guess it's also possible that they could have done that but i'm just gonna guess it's the original top from this body but there's scratches and nicks and dings along this thing it just looks like a real snake bit that had been played the coloration in the pattern isn't quite right but if you've never seen an original one you would never know i mean this is good artwork it's not that inferior it's just not quite as evil looking as an original same thing with this finish it's not quite as vibrant i guess you could say but it does appear to have a two-piece maple top you know what there we can see it les paul 6t so this was a les paul standard with a 60s neck that was labeled as a plus top yup that is exactly what we were looking for right there 100 confirmed unless somebody just wrote that in the pickup cavity but at that point if you're trying to pass it off as a custom shop you would kind of want to hide things like that so that is 100 what this thing was a 60s les paul standard but now we get to the bridge why does it have an abr-1 bridge i'm not sure because at this point in time like if it was a les paul classic it could have an abr one but this one would have normally had a nashville style bridge so i'm not sure how they converted that to an abr one but they did it's possible that they could have put like a veneer top over this but this looks like what a 60s plus les paul would be so i'm a little bit stumped on that but at least we know this is a real gibson body the tail piece is a full weight one it has a line going all the way across so that's probably just a replacement in general so at the very minimum this thing had to have been refinished because this relief carving they likely just carved it outside of the fact and then painted it and then finished over top of it because with real relief carvings they actually take it when the wood actually has the height so it's not completely sanded down yet and they carve it into the top so it actually stands up you can feel it so this one is not a flat decal they actually made it look real it stands up on top of the guitar it just was likely glued on top it'd be my guess but now going around the body when this came to me it actually had kind of a shaven down switch tip and if i remember correctly i actually have a an 80s part on here i might have actually swapped that back when i got this guitar because that doesn't quite look like an 80s one anymore but it looks so strange being small i wanted to make it look you know at least semi-what nicely but moving along here you can see some nicks and dings i mean it just looked like a real snake bit that had been played i love the wood grainage you have underneath this and the flame top over top of all that you get the snake here granted if you compare this to a real snake pit the colors just aren't right the design on the snake is a little bit different but this is quality artwork if you like the slash snake pit snake my wife hates this design like not even the fact that this one was just fake and whatnot but she just hates this guitar in general i don't get it i mean for me it's it's the first slash signature guitar you gotta love this thing i wouldn't normally be a big fan of what this looks like in general but i like it because of what it represents but continuing on we can see it's a two-piece top and looking in here i was trying to see if the seam actually lined up however i don't see the seam line there but that doesn't mean it's not there okay we can see it in the neck pickup cavity i mean that doesn't still completely rule out that it might be a veneer top over top of a real maple top in order to do that abr one conversion job button this is one of those things i don't think we'll ever be able to know but we've got the kind of correct style of knobs here now when i had first gotten it one of these had a chip the ones used on the actual snake pits are a little bit darker in hue than these pretty much the only anomaly here on the top is somebody has two different screws in here like they're very close together so i think normally it'd be installed like this but they have it lined up with that one so the neck pickup is very very slightly crooked because of that the screws that they actually use to secure these down are not the correct style they're more of a dome shape instead of being flat like most of the original ones have so as far as the top goes very convincing right i mean sure you got some weird stuff under the finish but we'll be able to see that better on the back i think it's time to move on from our mahogany body if it was a standard it would have nine hole weight relief and our maple top into our mahogany neck and an ebony fretboard so let's just take a look at all this if this did indeed start life as a standard as the body suggests that means this whole fretboard was likely replaced at one point in time in order to put the ebony fretboard on here and then do all your snake inlays and whatnot that probably took a lot of time to do and here's a really good evidence of that you see how this fret nib doesn't actually line up with the end of the fret that's like just not a possibility i mean i suppose somebody could have went too far with their chisel shaping the fret ends but it just looks to me like you can see very small gaps that they took the original binding on this guitar off like you can see a gap right here that they filled in with like a little bit of epoxy and then other ones just have a gap so they took the original binding off put a new fretboard on and to save cost they put the original binding back on that's why some of those don't quite perfectly line up that would be my best guess as to what happened it's either they made new binding and it just wasn't all that good but if you're really looking you can definitely tell there's something fishy going on there there's a small crack in the fretboard right here here's another good area where you can see like some glue had seeped out like they might have cracked the fretboard putting these inlays in or something there's a small dent on the fretboard right here but you can just see all kinds of tooling marks on the edges which you do see on real gibson so at that point i was just like okay well is this what it is i mean you gotta remember i never had a modern day gibson as high-end as this when i first saw this guitar so i didn't know what to expect i mean this was back in the days where i refused to buy anything made after 1979. like can you guys believe that there was once a trogley who hated 80s gibsons i thought they were inferior boy i was missing out on a lot of cool stuff the spotlights helped convert me 80s gibsons are some of my favorite now but anyways we've got 22 frets on this guy and the snake inlay they use mother of pearl for the bottom then you get abalone for the top and that does appear to be the real deal on here i was telling you guys in the other episode what makes this one not look right is the eyes a little bit too big the head's not flat the tongue is actually painted on rather than inlaid like it should be it's got these weird kissy lips and all the segments on the snake's body should be parallel meaning not kind of tilting this way that way this way i mean more similar to like what you're seeing right here but this was definitely probably all hand done right here it looks good though i'll commend whoever did this there's just some uh you know reworking weird stuff going on but that's the fake snake still maintains the 12 inch fretboard radius but we have a 1.65 inch nut width which increases to 2.03 by the 12. first fret necked up the point eight four and point nine three by the twelfth i mean i would say that lines up pretty consistently with a sixty standard neck however that nut seems a bit thin but then again it's just been a while since i've had one of those here's what that looks like at the first fret and the 12th fret c-shaped neck so this nut clearly has lacquer on it but it's not actually seated properly so maybe when they rip the fretboard off they kind of mess that up so i put some painters tape under here just to shim it and it works okay but to back up the story of how worn this thing looks there actually is fretwear on this thing so the collector who had it before me they they must have played it i mean especially right here like it's not so much in the cowboy cord areas like you can see some but it's like on that fifth fret right here just kind of going up here so this guitar definitely needs a little bit of a level recrown and setup job in my opinion because there are some frets that were buzzy at least when i first got it like there were some actual dead frets but that's why i wanted my luthier guy at the time to you know look into it a bit more but now the headstock look at that it's got the actual real gibson truss rod style in here so that tells you it's not some import fake despite the truss rod cover saying yes i am an imported guitar fake truss rod cover that says slash this is just not right at all i mean you see the loops at the top that's not how a real one is now keep in mind the slash ones were special in metal but it would still be the exact same shape just a small semi-circle bump instead of the full circle and there should be some sort of a circle down here rather than being completely flat that's what you see on all chips and so this definitely came from not the right source but you know it kind of looks the part on this something else that gives the truss rod cover away is you got one screw that looks like what it should and then you've got one very strange one that should not normally be on a truss rod cover screw but the neck itself does appear to be authentic so then we get here that means somebody probably scraped off the original gibson veneer and put a new one on it they did a horrendous job refinishing the top of this i mean you see all that when bruce kunkle said metallic junk this is the part he was talking about i just thought it was like sparkles in the finish or something again i i i didn't no i didn't know what to expect but this is where you can see a gibson that doesn't have the shrinking around the logo looks so strange doesn't it that's how you tell it's not the real deal but it did get the correct abalone inlay on there but you can see like some fake relic right here i think they were trying to do that just to play off okay this was a players one that somebody actually gigged out that's why some of these parts have been replaced and stuff it was a very elaborate scam here because this does happen on some guitars like check out my les paul gt review that guitar has very similar wear and that's a legit thing now back here we've got a couple of additional red flags but let's go in here so the back control plate obviously this is gibson usa stuff they have the metal base plate now sure we could take that off wire it back up clean up the solder job because these are just appalling but the style of pots that they actually put in a real snake pit to make this an even more convincing fake at that point but somebody's got the orange drop capacitors in here which i mean slash is known for using but this is definitely not what a custom shop one would look like however i mean the routing and everything else it actually does look correct the only thing a bit strange here that also proves this is a refinish is the fact that they have a screw right here for the grounding tab now it's actually kind of funny is you would sometimes see that on 80s models but i don't think that's what this is based on the other evidence we've been seeing here so here's what the toggle switch cavity looks like nothing seems out of place here but the fact that that screw has red paint over top of it means that was probably in there as they were respraying this into the red color and of course they've got that metallic junk in here i mean it was likely just because it was a dirty environment that they were doing this refinish in but it feels good like i'm not convinced it's 100 nitro but it wouldn't surprise me like whoever did this they had an idea of how to make this guitar look good they just didn't quite fully execute it right i always thought the binding looks strange on this guitar for the body especially in the cutaway area it's like a very peach color now what that is now that i have a little bit more experience is that's probably the red finish bleeding off into it or they changed it from the original binding that was on the standard because they wanted it to look more like the aged snake pit one i mean you can see the color difference between that very traditional cream jack plate versus the binding that would normally match so that's probably some sort of a binding bleed we've got shawler strap blocks on this right now that's how it came to me but that's what the edge looks like i mean everything looks all right here obviously you've got some fake wear or just spots where the finish didn't catch in a few areas or they uh buffed through more likely but now where things get really interesting this neck so this is supposed to be a 60s neck standard right i mean once again we've got all the dots in the finish looking up here i mean it's definitely a mahogany neck you can see the wood grain but my biggest question for this one once i found out what it was you know being a 60s les paul standard where's the serial number because those would have been impressed in the back of the headstock whereas this now has the slash serial number but i don't see any evidence of where that old serial number was like you can't just make wood not show an impression so that's kind of why i always thought this was more so like a les paul classic that had an ink stamp serial number to begin with because that would also help explain our abr one bridge and maybe they had similar markings in them maybe i'm reading that wrong because then that would make sense but if this was indeed a standard that there's no way they could have done that unless they put like a veneer and somehow hid it within the wood grain but i don't see anything like that i thought i'd take a couple of the tuners off actually i was only going to take this one off and then i saw this what the heck it's like their new veneer for the top didn't quite line up so they had to readjust where that hole normally was i i've never seen that on a real gibson so that's something strange but not all of them are like that so i'm did it leave the factory like that a little wonky i i i don't know probably not the tuners that are on here are gibson deluxe branded clues and style tuners and they say made in japan on the back not sure if that's era correct for this or not but here's the biggest nail in the coffin in my opinion if you look around the edge of the neck you can see this like color around it that makes me think it's possible a brand new neck was put on this guitar because that just might be the glue seeping out and then it caught the finish that could be a telltale sign of you know this has a new neck on it which is possible because again as i was telling you if it started life as a standard they would need to hide that serial number somehow it's either that or keep in mind these guys they weren't the best at finishing guitars it's very likely that paint just got built up right there as it dripped down off the side of the neck or whatnot but that is something that i noticed there and perhaps that's why this neck feels just a tad different to me on this side of it it's either that or as they were sanding off the original finish it kind of changed the contour along here it is a pretty comfortable neck though but anyways if anybody actually owns the real sl072 i would love to see photos of it but that's i remember that being another thing that confused me because since this would technically technically be a second run slash i thought maybe okay are some of these weird strange differences actually because this is a second run did they have a different snake i remember that being a question in my mind sometimes and again that just goes back to there's not a lot of documentation of this model out there so there you go that's how i got fooled you know up close when you really look at it and you know your stuff you can see that there's some things off but from just a couple feet away this definitely looks the part and is enough to fool most people that look at it especially if we were to refinish it clean up some of the dirty finish and swap out some of the obvious fake parts like that slash truss rod cover the only thing you couldn't really fix is the dopey looking snake is compared to the original scary looking one so i hope you enjoyed solving this mystery with me today well at least solved as much as humanly possible without knowing who did this work as far as the weight about nine and a half pounds at nine pounds seven point three ounces all right we actually have michael weber to do the demo of this one he recorded that last year so that's just old footage that i've kept for a while i don't have the direct audio recordings but hey we do have the camera audio and then i'll do a little cameo play as well just kidding you guys thought i was gonna forget to do the blacklight test so i remember telling the seller it doesn't glow under blacklight it does glow but maybe this has just developed over the couple of years that i've owned it but not as much as i would expect so that was the back i mean the top actually does glow now again i i really don't remember what it was when i first had it but you can see the snake definitely glow so just because the guitar glows does not mean it's the original finish it just means it has some age or it's just that kind of finish that glows right away it's mainly only useful for determining touch-ups because you'll see like this finish doesn't glow as much as the area right here signifying a headstock break which isn't the case on this particular guitar that's what this one looks like under black light not really too much to show you here because it was likely all refinished at the same time especially that neck area that looks to have been sprayed at the same time as we're the sides so now let's get to the playing demo [Music] oh [Music] uh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] i [Music] [Music] [Music] but uh [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] so [Music] all right the fake pit let's hear how it sounds in my hands [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] i'd say it sounds pretty darn good now there are some fretting issues on here like these could use like a heavy duty polish not just a steel wool job because some of them do feel a bit scratchy it's nothing too crazy but there's a few frets where you can kind of feel like a small ridge let's go ahead and try some distortion [Music] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] about [Music] uh so [Music] [Music] [Music] well i'd say this thing sounds pretty darn good definitely a microphonic bridge pickup but you know that adds to some of the cool tones out of this thing definitely sounds like slash i mean it's his signature pickups inside of usa les paul so i'd imagine it would sound good right [Applause] [Music] [Music] now that we know all about the fake pit what are my final thoughts on this thing i actually really enjoyed playing this guitar sometimes you know there's some issues on the frets where you can like feel a little bit of give where they need to be a little bit more highly polished and then in other locations it just completely chokes out like towards the top of the neck like it's not too bad but like definitely right here it just chokes out so maybe i just need to raise the bridge actually get the saddles properly notched and then get a proper refinish that doesn't have all the weird junk in it and this would definitely be very convincing for most people but the tones they were all there but i mean they're signature pickups so i would imagine so in a usa les paul so troglodytes i hope you enjoyed finally learning the complete tale of this guitar as well as getting to see it on the workbench to see what this thing actually is it appears to be some sort of a remade les paul so it's a real gibson it just it didn't leave the factory like this it's kind of like a semi what good conversion job but they kind of failed when it came to the finishing aspects but all right troglodytes don't forget to like comment and subscribe share this video with a friend who would enjoy it and we will catch you tomorrow on the next episode take care [Music] as always if you're interested in being the next owner of one of these demo guitars you can check them out on my website trogleysguitarshow.com there's some links in the description [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 250,472

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, gibson les paul, fender, trogly fake snakepit, trogly slash snakepit, Gibson Les Paul Slash Snakepit, Gibson Les Paul, gibson les paul slash snakepit, counterfeit snakepit, trogly snakepit story, trogly snakepit, 1997 Gibson Les Paul Slash Snakepit, 1998 Gibson Slash Snakepit, 1996 Gibson Slash Snakepit, Snakepit Les Paul, Snakepit Les Paul scam, fake gibson les paul, fake gibson, fake les paul, replica 1959 les paul, replica les paul, chibson

Id: X5PjG2jIuec

Length: 40min 11sec (2411 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021